How Being Busy Means Not Being Creative

All too often, we act as though those two words mean the same thing. But they don’t: being productive doesn’t equal being busy. And the correlation between productive and busy is weak at best: being busier doesn’t necessarily make you more productive.

Here’s a third word: creative.

Add that one into the mix, and things turn sour. I’ll spare you the Venn diagram, but busy and creative don’t tend to overlap.

You’ve probably experienced this first hand. You have a creative thing which you do, a process where you make something unique and put something of yourself, your individuality, into it. When you’re busy, that creativity stalls. When your mind is on the dozen other things you need to get done, you’re locked out from that creative zone.

Busyness is antithetical to creativity. If you’ve ever tried to force creativity, you’ll know this. Chances are, you can push onwards, cramming your creative work into thin slices of time, but it’s like driving with the handbrake on: it’s not doing you, or your work, any good.

Busyness is Shallow

When you’re busy, your attention is constantly on the moment. You obsess over this half-hour, this email, this task on the to-do list, and your focus isn’t on enjoying each task and giving it the value it needs – but on getting through it so that you can get on with the next thing.

You end up focusing on what needs to be done today – rather than on what you want to achieve this year. Busyness can be seductive: it offers a caffeine-like buzz of scrambled thoughts; it can be a way to show off to the people around you; it may even reassure you that you’re a good and productive person.

Being busy means adopting tunnel vision, constantly focusing ahead, with no time to deviate, to wander, to glance at the richness and the possibilities all around you.

When you’re busy, you miss out on getting any real depth. Maybe you end up cutting out time you’d spend in meditation, prayer or reading. You find yourself putting off creating until another day. That novel stays in the bottom drawer. That painting gathers dust in your studio.

Busyness Stops You Dreaming

My creative material is words, and a good portion of those are spent on fiction. I’m taking a part-time MA in creative writing, learning from some great and generous authors. One theme which comes up often is the need to dream. Creativity activity is fundamentally different from much of what we do when we’re busy. Whether you work with words or paint, pixels or code, your creativity comes from somewhere beneath the surface chatter of conscious thoughts.

During your life, you’ll have had ideas come to you at the most unexpected times, often when your mind isn’t on anything in particular. Whatever does it for you – country walks, long baths, meditation, exploration, daydreaming – there’s a fair chance that, when you’re busy, those gaps of time get crushed out of your life.

When you go into a creative session, it takes a while to get into flow. If my mind is too clogged with what’s already happened in the day, or if I know I’ve got other things to finish before bed, it’s very hard to enter that creative zone.

Productivity Isn’t About Outputs

When we get in a tangle and try to match up creativity with productiveness with busyness, it’s often because we’ve been taught to align productivity with outputs – particularly measurable outputs: words written, hours worked, widgets cranked.

But being productive isn’t about being able to point to items ticked off on a to-do list. It’s possible, indeed, easy, to be very busy and active without producing anything worthwhile. You could train yourself to type faster and write two thousand words an hour, but they’ll never be great literature; chances are, they’ll never even be publishable.

Creating a single stunning painting, or a single haunting piece of music, is far more “productive” than trying to make ten mediocre ones.

Being truly productive often means eschewing busyness. That may mean making sacrifices (financial or otherwise) for the sake of having the necessary space to create. It may mean being deliberately, even brazenly, counter-culture by insisting that more is not better, and by finding your own meaning rather than letting society dictate your life to you.

What would you rather leave when you’re gone – an empty inbox, or a masterpiece that touches the lives of people you’ll never meet?

Great post. This message is one I really needed to hear today. I’ve been thinking about how to deal with this, but you’ve made the issue much clearer.

I keep trying to be busy in order to be productive, and it just doesn’t work. Getting too scattered with too many to-dos means things get started but not completed too often. (Now, if I can just convince my boss of that.)

I find I get some of my best, most creative thinking done when I’m out riding my bicycle. It requires just enough focus to avoid hitting things that I can only focus on one other thought. I can’t be so “scatterbrained” then.

Thanks Robyn! I love it when my posts come at just the right time for someone. Walking and cycling are great thinking times for me, though after the last time I cycled through a red light while having a creative brainwave, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the road… .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

This post could not be more true. And this is something I have been wrestling with all my life. I have always been someone motivated by creativity and meaning, yet many people often see me as “lazy,” because I like to free up my time, and not be dazed and confused by a constant state of busy-ness. Thanks for the inspiration! .-= Steven | The Emotion Machine´s last blog ..How To Combat Work Overload =-.

Steve, thanks. You’re not lazy, you’re the sane one in a world of madness… 😉

If anything, I think there’s an intellectual or creative laziness in running around being busy – it can numb you and stop you from *thinking*. .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

As to solutions … well, that’s a whole other post, and one I don’t have! Good luck with your planning. I believe firmly in blocking out chunks of space on the calendar, and defending them against any threats of invasion. 😉 .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

Wow, thank you! 🙂 This one seems to be hitting some good notes with people. Hope it helps you move forwards not just in the right direction, but at the right pace and with enough time to admire the landscape around… .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

Wow! Awesome post .. and I love the manner in which you have broken all these concepts down… interesting on reflection to think of busyness as shallow obviously at the point of busyness attention is on the moment. It’s about time for more creativity and productivity ….Thanks…. Just added both you and your guest to my watch list below ….. .-= Fatibony{self help wellness}´s last blog ..62 More Personal Development Blogs – Watch List 2010 =-.

Outstanding post! Venn diagrams notwithstanding (drew far too many in previous lives!), you are exactly right: creativity occurs when we attain the right mix of motivation, mental (both conscious and unconscious) and physical preparation, acumen, etc. In the best of cases, we call it being “in the zone” when creativity flows and all else is cast aside.

Great way of putting it — I think I’m often quite motivated but don’t take sufficient time to prepare, mentally and physically. It’s another symptom of busyness, I guess: we tend to dive right in and feel we should “get on” with something, without giving ourselves time to make a proper start. .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

This post is extremely timely, but at the same time, I wish I had this about 5 years ago. I had a boss who used to tell me “you dont look busy enough”. So, I started typing faster…and produced pure garble.

The world could do with fewer bosses like that… It shouldn’t be about “looking” busy, it should be about the results that you produce! .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

Charlie has a keen eye for spotting talent and showcasing fresh and original material.

This is a brilliant post, Ali, once again. Thanks. You are a one of a kind writer.

Yes, we are conditioned like robots from an early age to watch the clock: be on time, every time, or pay for the consequences.

“What is this life/If full of care/If one has no time to stand and stare,” wrote a poet once. Wise words which touch the heart.

Yet, the corporations we work for (and buy from) are concerned about the “bottom line” of productivity and profits.

Thus, if you day-dream, heaven forbid, you are labeled as an outcast, space cadet, lazy bones, tooth fairy and even Santa Claus.

That’s why many creative people–artists, scientists, entrepreneurs–have had difficulties with structured environments, such as formal schooling and the cubicles of our life-sapping workplaces. How sad.

There is more to life than speed, efficiency, productivity and other management buzzwords that are drummed into us.

We need to pursue work which we love to do, which is our calling, and pursue work in a spirit of play. Work needs to be fun.

I have written my most memorable poems while playing sports and going for lazy strolls in the wild, open outdoors and not when those poems were demanded by an authority with fancy, smart ass credentials.

Many creative people have also reported the need to be left alone to work in splendid isolation, hence the “mad scientist” stereotype. Group think is the anti-thesis of an act of creation.

Creative people don’t follow the herd; they are originals who groove to the beat of the music and tap-dance to the invisible song buzzing with a force of one.

I agree that rigid structure, like busyness, is hardly conductive to being creative. Though I think too much solitude isn’t necessarily helpful either — many of my best ideas are the ones I bounce off other people. .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

Nice post, seems I’ve been running into a lot of posts & articles on the difference between being busy & being productive. This is the first time someone threw creativity into the mix how ever. That’s a valid point that I often forget that no matter what we do creativity is an important part of it all.

It’s just so true that I do my best creative work when I allow myself to sink down into that quiet fertile space that is WAY below all the mental chatter and running around. And my creative productivity moves at it’s own time and rhythm which is often much slower than the buzzing busy bee mind. Which of course drives that part of me totally crazy!!

Next time it’s bugging me I’ll read it this post, and see if it helps to calm it down (-:

Oh Chris, I could have written that comment myself! It is hard to allow yourself time and space and freedom to just play around and enjoy creating when your brain is saying “but the emails… the blog posts… the washing up…”

So I did one of the only things I know to do that will calm me the hell down. I journaled it out, and what I saw was, yet again, I’m on the edge of too busy to do anything creatively meaningful in my life.

It’s difficult to say no to the people and things who demand of your time and want to clutter it with busy work. Especially if those things have been paying your bills for a while.

But you nailed it: our best work comes when we’re productive, when we’re flowing. And when there’s too much crap on the proverbial plate, that ain’t gonna happen.

As with your other commenters, your timing on this entry is a blessing.

I’ve just (a couple of weeks ago) started journalling after each of my fiction-writing sessions, and I’m finding it a hugely helpful tool. It’s really highlighting how busyness and stress kill the creative energy!

Glad the timing worked for you, too, and thank you for stopping by to say that … it means a lot to me to know I’ve had a positive impact on someone else’s day. 🙂 .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Carrying On When Rewards Are Distant =-.

Yes! I’ve often heard Steve Chandler say that Busyness is Lazyness. Because you’re not exactly doing the things you want to be doing when you’re always “Busy”.

Funnily enough I coined the term Focusiness as opposed to Business, because I didn’t want to be “busy” but rather more focused in my efforts. 🙂 .-= Nathalie Lussier´s last blog ..Mindful Monday: Live Event was a Success =-.

Hah, I love “Focusiness” (though I think I’m going to confuse it with “Folksiness” if I’m not careful). Yes, I think Busyness is a Type A sort of laziness. It’s probably better to be genuinely lazy! .-= Ali Hale´s last blog ..Struggling With Self Improvement? =-.

Excellent post Ali. Brings back memories of when I was IT Director at Young & Ribucam. One of the guys that wrote the music for commercials sat across the hall from me. One day, he was laying on the sofa in his office, strumming a guitar; he shot up and said to me, “They really expect me to be creative 4 hours a day here! No way anyone can do that!!” 🙂 That was one of the funniest things I had heard in awhile as we in IT were putting in 14 hour days and were expected to be creative in our problem solving., which is impossible when you’re working, not creating!

[…] the way – where you work on developing self-discipline, or where you learn the hard way that being busy destroys your creativity. But, on the whole, it’s supposed to be an adventure. It’s not supposed to be a life-sapping […]

So easy to bury our heads in the sand and get busy doing nothing to take our mind off the fact that all we’re really doing is engaging in mindless activity. It’s a trap and a great excuse for not doing more productive things.

I love this because it puts where I’m at with my job right now into words. Trouble is, I don’t know what to do about it. I run a marketing department. I now have six employees. In 2008, I had one. I’ve traded building stories for our website, designing flyers and brochures, etc. for building a department. On one hand, I believe that building a department is in its own way creative. I love it. I feel like I’m looking at the bigger picture and making a difference. However, my creative responsibilities haven’t gone away entirely. I still have to come up with ad campaigns for print, radio and television. While I work well with my department, I find that bridge between building and managing a department and building an ad, more difficult to cross. The bridge between both sides of my brain is getting rickety and yesterday I was stuck in the middle for the entire day. I have taken up running to de-stress and clear my head, but I can’t say it’s helping my creativity. I’m just not sure how to keep the path between my creative mind and my role as a manager easy to cross. Anyone have any advice for staying creative when you have to be busy too? I’ve taken to adding one work-at-home day to my schedule again and I spent the whole day trying to cross that bridge. Productive? Uh, no.

With my writing, I find it helpful to block out chunks of time where I can just think about the work and not about the rest of life/business. Though it sounds like you’re trying that with the work-at-home day…

Is there any way you can take a creative retreat? Perhaps a long weekend? Not to necessarily do actual creative *work*, but to just give your brain the time it needs to recharge and regather material for the times when you do turn to creating ad campaigns.